RE-INVESTIGATION:

In 2006, a cold-case review began, given the code name Operation Ottawa and all evidence from the Peter and Gwenda Dixon murders was reinvestigated. The taskforce was headed up by Detective Superintendent Steve Wilkins and top of the suspect list was a man named John Cooper.

He’d been a prolific burglar, whose crimes took a violent turn in the mid-Eighties. In 1998, he’d been arrested for a series of break-ins in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Following a raid on Cooper’s home, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison on 30 counts of robbery and burglary, with police discovering stolen jewellery, silverware and more at his property.

While police tirelessly worked through evidence from the crime scenes and what had been confiscated from Cooper’s home, they hoped to be able to finally solve the harrowing murder cases. They were searching for a ‘golden nugget’ that would convict Cooper.

‘My team of scientists trawled through hundreds of crime scene items and did not find anything new,’ forensic scientist Professor Angela Gallop said. ‘I wanted to

explore textile and fabric links, as they had in other cases led us to DNA.’

John Cooper’s son had told police that his father used to take a shotgun out with him at night while he’d been growing up. The Dixons and the Thomases had all been killed with a shotgun.

Cooper’s black-painted sawnoff shotgun ( below), had been recovered from a hedgerow where he’d discarded it.

Professor Gallop said there were minute paint flecks found on the bottom of the bag it had

been stored in and the reddish material was tested. It was blood. More scrapings of black paint were taken and blood – belonging to Peter Dixon – was found on the surface.

A pair of shorts that had been found on Cooper’s kitchen units were also tested and on the lower left leg of the shorts was the tiniest piece of evidence – a blood stain that matched Peter Dixon’s DNA. Fibres from the short’s pockets matched those from a sock worn by Richard Thomas. Had the police finally caught the killer?